The Autobiography of Mark Twain Mark Twain (best beach reads .TXT) 📖

in California, in Jericho⁠—and I have to seem so glad and so happy to meet these persons who knew in this intimate way one who was so near and dear to me. And this is the kind of thing that gradually turns a person into a polite liar and deceiver, for my mother was never in any of those places.

One pretty creature was glad to see me again, and remembered being at my house in Hartford⁠—I don’t know when, a great many years ago, it was. Now she was mistaking herself for somebody else. It couldn’t have happened to her. But I was very cordial, because she was very pretty. We might have had a good long chat except for the others that I had to talk with and work up reminiscences that belonged in somebody else’s experiences, not theirs or mine.

There was one young fellow, brisk, but not bright, overpoweringly pleasant and cordial, in his way. He said his mother used to teach school in Elmira, New York, where he was born and bred and where the family continued to reside, and that she would be very glad to know that he had met me and shaken hands, for he said: “She is always talking about you. She holds you in high esteem, although, as she says, she has to confess that of all the boys that ever she had in her school, you were the most troublesome.”

“Well,” I said, “those were my last school days, and through long practice in being troublesome, I had reached the summit by that time, because I was more than thirty-three years old.”

It didn’t affect him in the least. I don’t think he even heard what I said, he was so eager to tell me all about it, and I said to him once more, so as to spare him, and me, that I was never in a schoolhouse in Elmira, New York, even on a visit, and that his mother must be mistaking me for some of the Langdons, the family into which I married. No matter, he didn’t hear it⁠—kept on his talk with animation and delight, and has gone to tell his mother, I don’t know what. He didn’t get anything out of me to tell her, for he never heard anything I said.

These episodes used to vex me, years and years ago. But they don’t vex me now. I am older. If a person thinks that he has known me at some time or other, all I require of him is that he shall consider it a distinction to have known me; and then, as a rule, I am perfectly willing to remember all about it and add some things that he has forgotten.

Twichell came down from Hartford to be present at that meeting, and we chatted and smoked after we got back home. And reference was made again to that disastrous Boston speech which I made at Whittier’s seventieth-birthday dinner; and Joe asked me if I was still minded to submit that speech to that club in Washington, day after tomorrow, where Colonel Harvey and I are to be a couple of the four guests. And I said, “No,” I had given that up⁠—which was true. Because I have examined that speech a couple of times since, and have changed my notion about it⁠—changed it entirely. I find it gross, coarse⁠—well, I needn’t go on with particulars. I didn’t like any part of it, from the beginning to the end. I found it always offensive and detestable. How do I account for this change of view? I don’t know. I can’t account for it. I am the person concerned. If I could put myself outside of myself and examine it from the point of view of a person not personally concerned in it, then no doubt I could analyze it and explain to my satisfaction the change which has taken place. As it is, I am merely moved by instinct. My instinct said, formerly, that it was an innocent speech, and funny. The same instinct, sitting cold and judicial, as a court of last resort, has reversed that verdict. I expect this latest verdict to remain.

Twichell’s congregation⁠—the only congregation he has ever had since he entered the ministry⁠—celebrated the fortieth anniversary of his accession to that pulpit, a couple of weeks ago. Joe entered the army as chaplain in the very beginning of the Civil War. He was a young chap, and had just been graduated from Yale and the Yale Theological Seminary. He made all the campaigns of the Army of the Potomac. When he was mustered out, that congregation I am speaking of called him, and he has served them ever since, and always to their satisfaction⁠—except once.

I have found among my old MSS. one which I perceive to be about twenty-two years old. It has a heading and looks as if I had meant it to serve as a magazine article. I can clearly see, now, why I didn’t print it. It is full of indications that its inspiration was what happened to Twichell about that time, and which produced a situation for him which he will not forget until he is dead, if he even forgets it then. I think I can see, all through this artful article, that I was trying to hint at Twichell, and the episode of that preacher whom I met on the street, and hint at various things that were exasperating me. And now that I read that old article, I perceive that I probably saw that my art was not ingenious enough⁠—that I hadn’t covered Twichell up, and hadn’t covered up the episode that I was hinting at⁠—that anybody in Hartford could read everything between the lines that I was trying to conceal.

I will insert this venerable article in this place, and then take up that episode in Joe’s history and tell about it.

The Character of Man

Concerning Man⁠—he is too large a subject to